Jewish Public Forum Archive

Welcome to the Jewish Public Forum at CLAL Archive, where you will find materials published under the auspices of the Jewish Public Forum, including articles by, and interviews with, Forum participants.

For more information about the Jewish Public Forum, click here.

To access the Jewish Public Forum Archive, click here.

LANGUAGE OF HOPE

By Tsvi Blanchard

Like many Americans, I have been, and basically still am, committed to discussing public policy issues in religion-neutral, secular language.  Yet I find myself increasingly persuaded that those of us concerned with the political sphere should now be willing to consciously include some carefully delineated forms of religious rhetoric.  Why? Because religious rhetoric could stimulate greater popular participation in public discussion of the serious issues we currently face as a society. But we should deploy such language carefully, without undermining the Constitutional principle of the separation of Church and State, and without proselytizing to, and thus alienating, those who consider themselves strictly secular. 

Although I see newly emerging political possibilities—from global grassroots activism to local environmental initiatives—as indications that our political institutions are hardly moribund, I remain concerned about how few young Americans see the public square as a place to invest their lives.

 Opinion polls repeatedly reveal that many Americans do not believe that anything of real value can be achieved in politics.  Years on campus and in political organizing have shown me, as well as many others, that there is a pervasive belief that there are no viable alternatives to “the way things are.”  There is also a widespread belief that political idealism—usually associated with what is seen as the failed politics of the sixties—is naïve and foolish.  

One (though certainly not the only) way to address this concern is to enrich the public language in which we “do politics” by drawing on religious discourse. In some ways, religious language already plays an animating role in American political debate.    From the religiously conservative discourse of Christian evangelicals and Commentary magazine to the liberal ideology of the World Council of Churches and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, it is evident that religious language can still motivate many Americans to involve themselves in the political process.

The many Americans who enthusiastically purchased the Dalai Lama’s Ethics for the New Millennium demonstrated the cultural power of ideas drawn from religion. This book uses a modified Tibetan Buddhist religious language to lay out a vision that goes beyond individual happiness to issues of worldwide social and political well-being.  Its three-month tenure on The New York Times bestseller list suggests that, appropriately modified, religious language might motivate people to take action in the political sphere.  

What effective religious language lends to politics is a contemporary political language of hopeCa way of speaking that reflects a basic confidence in the power of collective human activity to change social realities.    In the United States, for example, SojournersCa progressive Christian group which focuses on social and political issues—has created a popular sweatshirt that reads, “Hope is believing in spite of the evidence and watching the evidence change.” In his three-volume work The Principle of Hope,[i] German political and social theorist Ernst Bloch makes a strong argument for the integral links between hope, imagination and political action.   Developing an American language of hope, then,  might help overcome the widespread disaffection with civic life that accompanies the hopelessness about any possibility for effecting political change. 

To be sure, fully responding to present concerns about civic engagement and political participation requires more than a change in language. Language alone cannot do everything—change unfair power relations, remedy inequalities, care for the vulnerable.   Nonetheless, there is no robust public life without robust public language. Hence, I want to focus on the possible use of religious language to reinvigorate some aspects of contemporary political debate. 

I want to be clear from the outset that I favor the use of religiously neutral language in arguments for specific government policies. Even though explicitly religious arguments are constitutionally permitted as the exercise of free speech, I believe, as a matter of principle, that public policy should be discussed in a maximally inclusive language that does not alienate or exclude religious minorities or those who have no religion at all. I do not advocate religious rhetoric that would effectively exclude those uncomfortable with religious language from debates over policy.   

Furthermore, from a purely practical standpoint, I am convinced that supporting policy positions by using language linked to particular religions alienates more Americans than it attracts.  Consider, for instance, the political debate about abortion.  Based on their particular religious commitments—Roman Catholic or Evangelical Christian—some Americans oppose abortion from the moment of conception.  In the public debate over whether and to what extent abortion should be made illegal, they have become highly invested in convincing others that human life begins at conception. But introducing what were clearly partisan religious arguments in support of campaigns for a national law or constitutional amendment about when human life begins did their cause far more harm than good.  Where they have succeeded, it has been primarily due not to the use of persuasion, but to the open use of political clout.  When religion and religious institutions function as interest groups, they are hardly likely to renew the American political sphere. 

Using the Jesus-laden language of the fundamentalist Christian right, for example, would in fact exclude the many Americans who find it unpalatable.  On the blockbuster TV show Survivor I, Dirk Been was unpopular in part because, according to The New York Times, he “talked about the Bible too much.”[ii]  We will not invigorate political discussionCand with it our public lifeCunless we use a language that resonates with a broad range of Americans.    

Religious language can do this when specific policy issues are not being debated.  At their best, both political and religious languages seek to mobilize our capacity for hope.  At present, many Americans are exhausted by a political rhetoric they perceive as nothing more than a thinly veiled discourse of power plays and resource grabbing.  As a result, they are not able to draw on the rich resources for hope that exist in our inherited political language. In contrast, as I have already indicated, there are growing social forces willing and able to create a language of political hope by drawing on the power of inherited religious language to imagine a better world in which the pain of the existing economic, political and cultural arrangements is overcome.  

In contemporary America, religious languages possess powerful moral resonance in ways that political languages do not.  Even scientific or artistic languages—focused as they are on “objective” analysis or individual vision—are not likely to provide the sort of force of conscience that religious language brings.  In the past, the power of ideas and images that originated in the language of inherited Western religious textsCa world at peace, liberty for allCmobilized people to express and work for transformative political visions. I am suggesting that today as well we may partly address the loss of political hope by tapping into the rhetorical power that morally imaginative religious language possesses.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush repeatedly characterized his political approach as “compassionate conservatism.”  “Compassion,” for many, suggests a value deeply rooted in traditional religion.  When I entered “compassion” in a keyword search at Amazon.com, eleven of the top twenty books listed, and two of the top three, used “compassion” in a religious sense.

Despite the religious provenance and overtones of the term “compassion,” Bush never explicitly identified the term with any particular religious tradition.  Similarly, when the Dalai Lama used “compassion,” and its Tibetan Buddhist equivalent nying je, in his Ethics for a New Millennium, this did not prevent him from assuring the reader that his book was not “religious”Calthough he did call it “spiritual.”

Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” favors non-governmental means for meeting America’s social welfare needs. In practice, this would entail eliminating many of the government programs that address these needs. For example, it might entail denying government health care benefits to many children.  Compassionate concern for the plight of “the losers” in the economic game would be expressed through a shift in emphasis to non-governmental sources of support.

Bush’s opponents did not take on the issue of moral compassion directly.  Instead, they limited themselves to arguing that his use of the term “compassionate conservatism” was in bad faith, nothing more than a rhetorical device designed to make conservatives feel better about doing away with government social welfare programs. I would suggest that Bush’s opponents would have been better off using his invocation of “compassion” as an opportunity to cast the debate in moral terms.  I believe that this would have opened the door to engaging many who might otherwise not have been engaged, or whose ideas about compassion differed from conservatives’ ideas. 

Imagine how the political debate might have proceeded if those moved by the language of Ethics for a New Millennium had participated. How different the debate might have been if Mr. Bush’s opponents had responded to his call for compassionate conservatism by declaring:  “We agree, Mr. Bush, that America needs a compassionate policy, but do you not also agree that if we are to be truly compassionate we must recognize ‘ourselves in all others—especially those who are disadvantaged and those whose rights are not respected?’[iii]  If so, can we sincerely believe that it is compassionate to shift the health care needs of the vulnerable to a market system that is already failing them?”

Whatever our political stance on crucial American social welfare policy issues, we must admit that Bush’s use of “compassion” would then have provided an effective trigger for greater public engagement with these issues by both conservatives and liberals.

Using religious language to enrich political debate will not only change political language; significant contact between two languages, like significant contact between two cultures, affects both languages. My argument should raise concerns, then, for “native speakers” of particular religious languages—those who frame their lives in terms of a particular religion and its way of speaking about human questions.  As native speakers stretch to find persuasive ways of bringing their language into a shared language of political discussion, they are likely to find that, even without meaning to, they are modifying the way they use some of the key terms in their particular religious language.

Native speakers should anticipate that the deliberate integration of religious language would have far greater effects on original meanings than those caused by casual contact between two languages and their supporting cultures. In order to offer their concepts in a politically relevant way, native speakers  will have to transcend the conceptual and linguistic limits of their own particular religious traditions. We can speak in a shared public square only if we are willing to trade some of our particular ways of speaking for those we can learn to hold in common.

Ethics for the New Millennium provides a good example of what happens when one modifies the use of an inherited religious term in order to speak in a politically and socially relevant way.   The Tibetan term nying je, translated as “compassion,” is intimately connected with Buddhism’s overall project of liberating human beings from the unbearable suffering of samsaraC“the dreamlike nature of the reality that sentient beings experience.”[iv]  Tibetan Buddhism especially values the boddhicitta, an attitude of loving kindness and compassion that seeks the liberation of all sentient beings, including animals.  The development of this attitude is supported by the traditional Tibetan Buddhist belief that all sentient beings were once our mothers [or parents] and acted “in some protective capacity toward us.”[v]

The Dalai Lama himself recognized that, had he insisted upon a precise definition of nying je in his English language book, and spelled out all the connotations this concept has within Tibetan Buddhism, there would have been little chance that the book could have influenced so wide an audience.

The benefits of the Dalai Lama’s choice to “translate” his native Tibetan into terms relevant to contemporary Westerners required surrendering key parts of the inherited Tibetan Buddhist conceptual scheme.  In Ethics for the New Millennium, the human suffering that the virtue of compassion is called upon to address is depicted as an unpleasant but limited part of the otherwise pleasant reality of human life. This contraction of the Buddhist concept of suffering (which equates life itself with suffering) made the book more accessible because, although most contemporary Americans want to suffer less, they do not see Buddhist liberation as either necessary or desirable.  Moreover, “compassion,” unlike nying je, in no way derives from a belief that all sentient beingsChuman and animalConce nurtured us or from its assumption of the truths of rebirth and reincarnation.

The Dalai Lama was surely correct, then, in believing that the term “compassion” would speak to those who would otherwise be put off by the beliefs associated with the Tibetan concept of nying je.   For the Dalai Lama, this lack of precision was a price worth paying in order to speak out about the pressing Western issues that so deeply concerned him.

As a “native speaker” of Tibetan Buddhist language, however, the Dalai Lama must have been aware of the potential costs to Tibetan Buddhism should the Americanized concept of compassion come to displace the meaning of nying je for Tibetans.  Such a shift away from the project of radical liberation would undermine the raison d’etre of Tibetan Buddhism. Weakening the traditional Tibetan language would only make the preservation of Tibetan Buddhist culture in exileCone of the Dalai Lama’s most valued projects—more difficult.   All things considered, Tibetan Buddhism would be better served if the translation of nying je as “compassion” were restricted to the Western public square, while the classical meaning of nying je remained more or less in place for native, and  would-be native, speakers. 

Translating a particular religious language into the very different language of the American public square is, then, a difficult proposition.  If “native speakers” can remain aware, however, that they are engaged in translation, and thus that different meanings are in play in the religious sphere and in the public sphere, the difficulty is well worth it.  Integrating the imaginative and visionary power of religious language into American political discussion is a much needed first step toward reinvigorating an increasingly cynical and apathetic American political realm. What our politics lacks is hope, and it is just this that a judicious incorporation of religious language might bring to our political life.

Once a shared language of hope finds a place in the political process, we will be better able to articulate, and believe in, the kind of creative, compelling visions of American society that would stimulate greater participation in political life.

To join the conversation at Jewish Public Forum Talk, click here.

To access the Jewish Public Forum Archive, click here.

To receive Jewish Public Forum columns by email on a regular basis, complete the box below:

Receive Jewish Public Forum columns by email!